I use Moneydance, similar to quicken but cheaper, less bloated, and easier to use. But I'm not good at keeping up with things. I balance our checkbook, and pay the bills on time but even downloading the data from the credit cards seems to be too much work. Never mind entering the receipts in one by one. So while we live withing our means, we we don't have the data to learn to live on less. I'm not sure what the answer is but I'm eager to learn what other people are doing. Or, if anyone has any ideas to share.

I just have a little spreadsheet where I balance my checkbook, and I breakdown my expenses there also. I have to track all of my spending weekly for my expense account, so I put all my receipts in the same folder, and do it all at the same time. It's been interesting to see where my money is going.

I have MS Money but really all i do for the 'quick look' is an excel spreadsheet. Finances for me are one of those household things that i procrastinate about - unfortunatly! I need to get them in order... it's driving me nuts!!!

I'm very old fashioned when it comes to this. I have a ledger notebook where I carefully budget what we spend every month. Then I make one withdrawal of cash every month, and put that money into envelopes. One for groceries, one for gas, etc. and I write checks for the bills. That's it. If there's not enough money in the envelopes that month, we don't buy it. If we're close to running out of gas, we cut out non-essential trips, etc. This system has made balancing the checkbook a snap, and I'm never worried about if we have enough money for something (I just have to check how much cash I have).

There are some great new web tools that I have recently started using to keep track of my family's expenses. The latest one is Simplee.com. It is essentially the mint.com (a site that centralizes all of your banking accounts, bills, loan accounts etc. which I have also recently started using) of healthcare, and it centralizes all of your health care accounts and lets you see your claims in a way that is understandable. There are some great visuals that allow you to see how much you have paid towards your deductible, how much your insurance company has paid, how much each service costs etc. I think this is such a great way of keeping track of your health care expenses, which for me, used to be so confusing. You guys should definitely check out both mint.com and Simplee.com!

We have created a financial calendar. Most of our payments are organized to come out of our accounts automatically at different times during the month. To keep track we made a calendar through Microsoft publisher that we can then write down what comes in and out when and where. Very helpful.